I need to try and eat less acidic food. How do I go about that please?
Is the ‘sparkling’ they put into mineral water cause it to be acidic? I have not been able to find ‘non sparkling’ mineral water.
4 Likes
Spring water is flat mineral water or they add CO2 to it to make it sparkling, so just buy flat spring water. Some can be naturally acidic depending on where it is captured from.
8 Likes
‘Still’ mineral water is common, and labelled as such, and as @grahroll noted it is spring water.
5 Likes
I suffer from IBS . Irritable Bowel Syndrome and GORD Gastro-oesophageal reflux disease so I need to be careful of how much acidic food I eat .I use the FODMAP DIET to control acid intake .
5 Likes
I doubt that there are many natural still mineral waters on the market that are acidic. By natural I mean groundwater that is filtered for purity but does not have additives. The minerals are mostly carbonate and bicarbonates salts which are alkaline. The only naturally occurring reason that groundwater might be acidic (that I can think of) is if it contained sulphur compounds that typically come from bores. Such would smell bad and are not likely to be a commercial success.
Sports drinks and other synthetics could be anything. Many bottled soft drinks are quite acidic.
Here is one survey. I cannot vouch for its accuracy and it doesn’t say what is in all the samples tested.
4 Likes
Depends on your reason for going on an alkaline (non-acid) diet. If it is for a medical condition, then follow the recommended diet from your health care professional and/or society. If it is for a “wellness” diet, be wary.
I had friends who attended a party plan where they were convinced that an alkaline diet would solve all their problems. They came home with books and charts that told them which foods were acid or alkaline and were subsequently up-sold on products like Bicarb Soda and alkaline water. I was appalled at the errors on their chart - it has lemon as alkaline, when it is as acidic as battery acid. It also showed that emotions had an acid / alkaline reading - predictably all the good emotions were alkaline. They were paying 10 to 30 times over shop price for drinking water and Bicarb - because the party plan operators said it was “purer” than their “pure” offering which was better than anything available in a shop.
11 Likes
The good old snake oil scam in action once again.
Is there a particular reason for this?
4 Likes
Yes it could.
Carbon dioxide quickly turns into carbonic acid in water (hence why there is concerns about oceans becoming more acidic as a result of CO2 emissions). Soda water for example has a pH of 3-4 (a university experiment I did many years ago showed it to moderately acidic). Carbonates in mineral water may buffer the carbonic acid, but without knowing the concentration of carbonates and CO2, it is not possible to determine if it would be acidic or neutral. Gut feeling is it would be slightly acidic with pH between 4 and 7. This paper indicates that it could be between 5.3 and 6, where non-sparkling will be slightly alkaline with pH of 7.1-7.5.
4 Likes
You can buy carbonate tablets to add to sparkling water (sold with soda syphon CO2 cylinders) which decrease the pH, making the water “sweeter”. Pure rain water here is slightly acidic, just under pH6 by my measurements, add CO2 and it goes below pH5.
If you need to be certain, but yourself a pH tester, reasonable quality units can be had for ~$50.
3 Likes
You can add bicarb soda to any water to drop the pH. You don’t need much (about 1/8 of a tsp to a litre of water), and it doesn’t make it taste too bad, and doesn’t make it fizzy. There’s a lot of evidentiary support for a Mediterranean diet combined with “alkaline water” for treatment of GORD/GERD and other conditions where stomach acids can be a problem.
You can also buy “alkaline water”, Woolies usually has it. Its a little pricey, but it does taste better than bicarb-d tap water 
3 Likes
A cheap pH tester is a swimming pool test kit. My kit is a simple “fill to this line” and “put 5 drops of No.3, shake and compare the colour”. pH scale is only 6.8 to 8.2 though. But anything yellow (acid) or brighter red (alkaline) you could estimate.
When I did Water & Sewer for a small shire our EPA limit was pH 9.0; if our water supply went over that the local doctor knew by the number of skin rashes presenting.
5 Likes
There are a few that are acidic in commercial drink bottles (most noted here are from USA sources but there are others from other sources eg Frantelle & Evian)
5 Likes
Another cheap and very easy to use PH Tester.
Is there a reason the product is cheap?
It is worth considering why the most common water ph test kits for pools, fish tanks etc use a chemical dye based test? Not a cheap single probe galvanic device.
1 Like
The matching moisture meter, which I also have, also works great.
Aside from the straight out soft drinks like coke there are a host of of flavoured, coloured and synthetic “mineral waters” many of which are gassed with CO2 which as we know lowers pH. Their pH will depend on composition and could be within a wide range.
If wanting alkalinity my advice would be to find one that you like that is as natural as possible and still, and check its pH with the manufacturer rather than try to measure it yourself.
3 Likes
My speech therapist recommended lemon water as it is (amazingly) alkaline. You cut a lemon into 8 wedges, put in a jug I’d water and leave on the bench overnight. Then drink the liquid and discard the lemon pieces. I like it as it also helps me get through enough water each day if I get through the jug full. Good luck.
An article explaining how acidic lemon juice become alkaline when digested.
1 Like
To be clear: the lemon juice doesn’t become alkaline. It is acidic and remains acidic when ingested.
From @Fred123’s citation: “Once digested and metabolized, lemon juice produces alkaline byproducts, which make the urine more alkaline” (bolding is mine to make it clear).
Because the urine tests show it to be more alkaline after digesting lemon juice some people make the unsubstantiated claim that lemon makes the blood, or the digestive system, or … alkaline.
5 Likes
